First thing
this morning, the president signed into
law the Military Commissions Act of
2006, which does away with habeas
corpus, the right of suspected
terrorists or anybody else to know why
they have been imprisoned, provided the
president does not think it should apply
to you and declares you an enemy
combatant.

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TRANSCRIPT

History does not
play well at
this White
House.
Expressionless
faces would
probably greet
references to
how John Adams
ended his
political career
by insisting he
needed the Alien
and Sedition
Acts to silence
his critics in
the newspapers,
or how Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s
executive order
to seize
Japanese-Americans
during World War
II necessitated
a formal
presidential
apology eight
presidents
later.

But even so,
somebody probably should have told
President Bush that today was the exact
135th anniversary, to the day, that
President Grant suspended habeas corpus
in much of South Carolina for the noble
and urgent purpose of dispersing the Ku
Klux Klan and making sure the freed
slaves had all their voting rights,
neither of which has yet truly occurred.
It is your principal defense against
imprisonment without charge and trial
without defense thrown away for no good
reason, then and now.

First thing
this morning, the president signed into
law the Military Commissions Act of
2006, which does away with habeas
corpus, the right of suspected
terrorists or anybody else to know why
they have been imprisoned, provided the
president does not think it should apply
to you and declares you an enemy
combatant.

Further, the
bill allows the CIA to continue using
interrogation techniques so long as they
do not cause what is deemed, quote,
“serious physical or mental pain.” And
it lets the president to ostensibly pick
and choose which parts of the Geneva
Convention to obey, though to hear him
describe this, this repudiation of the
freedoms for which all our soldiers have
died is a good thing.

(BEGIN VIDEO
CLIP)

PRESIDENT BUSH: This bill
spells out specific, recognizable
offenses that would be considered crimes
in the handling of detainees, so that
our men and women who question captured
terrorists can perform their duties to
the fullest extent of the law. And this
bill complies with both the spirit and
the letter of our international
obligations.

(END VIDEO
CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Leading
Democrats view it differently, Senator
Ted Kennedy calling this “seriously
flawed,” Senator Patrick Leahey saying
it’s, quote, “a sad day when the
rubber-stamp Congress undercuts our
freedoms,” and Senator Russ Feingold
adding that “We will look back on this
day as a stain on our nation’s history.”

Outside the
White House, a handful of individuals
protested the law by dressing up as Abu
Ghraib abuse victims and terror
detainees. Several of them got
themselves arrested, but they were
apparently quickly released, despite
being already dressed for Gitmo.

To assess what
this law will truly mean for us all, I’m
joined by Jonathan Turley, professor of
constitutional law at George Washington
University.

I want to start
by asking you about a specific part of
this act that lists one of the
definitions of an unlawful enemy
combatant as, quote, “a person who,
before, on, or after the date of the
enactment of the Military Commissions
Act of 2006, has been determined to be
an unlawful enemy combatant by a
combatant status review tribunal or
another competent tribunal established
under the authority of the president or
the secretary of defense.”

Does that not
basically mean that if Mr. Bush or Mr.
Rumsfeld say so, anybody in this
country, citizen or not, innocent or
not, can end up being an unlawful enemy
combatant?

JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON
UNIVERSITY CONSTITUTIONAL LAW PROFESSOR:
It certainly does. In fact, later on,
it says that if you even give material
support to an organization that the
president deems connected to one of
these groups, you too can be an enemy
combatant.

And the fact
that he appoints this tribunal is
meaningless. You know, standing behind
him at the signing ceremony was his
attorney general, who signed a memo that
said that you could torture people, that
you could do harm to them to the point
of organ failure or death.

So if he
appoints someone like that to be
attorney general, you can imagine who
he’s going be putting on this board.

OLBERMANN: Does this mean
that under this law, ultimately the only
thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out
of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of
the president of the United States?

TURLEY: It does. And it’s
a huge sea change for our democracy.
The framers created a system where we
did not have to rely on the good graces
or good mood of the president. In fact,
Madison said that he created a system
essentially to be run by devils, where
they could not do harm, because we
didn’t rely on their good motivations.

Now we must.
And people have no idea how significant
this is. What, really, a time of shame
this is for the American system. What
the Congress did and what the president
signed today essentially revokes over
200 years of American principles and
values.

It couldn’t be
more significant. And the strange thing
is, we’ve become sort of constitutional
couch potatoes. I mean, the Congress
just gave the president despotic powers,
and you could hear the yawn across the
country as people turned to, you know,
“Dancing with the Stars.” I mean, it’s
otherworldly.

OLBERMANN: Is there one
defense against this, the legal
challenges against particularly the
suspension or elimination of habeas
corpus from the equation? And where do
they stand, and how likely are they to
overturn this action today?

TURLEY: Well, you know
what? I think people are fooling
themselves if they believe that the
courts will once again stop this
president from taking over—taking almost
absolute power. It basically comes down
to a single vote on the Supreme Court,
Justice Kennedy. And he indicated that
if Congress gave the president these
types of powers, that he might go along.

And so we may
have, in this country, some type of uber-president,
some absolute ruler, and it’ll be up to
him who gets put away as an enemy
combatant, held without trial.

It’s something
that no one thought—certainly I didn’t
think—was possible in the United
States. And I am not too sure how we
got to this point. But people clearly
don’t realize what a fundamental change
it is about who we are as a country.
What happened today changed us. And I’m
not too sure we’re going to change back
anytime soon.

OLBERMANN: And if Justice
Kennedy tries to change us back, we can
always call him an enemy combatant.

The president
reiterated today the United States does
not torture. Does this law actually
guarantee anything like that?

TURLEY: That’s actually
when I turned off my TV set, because I
couldn’t believe it. You know, the
United States has engaged in torture.
And the whole world community has
denounced the views of this
administration, its early views that the
president could order torture, could
cause injury up to organ failure or
death.

The
administration has already established
that it has engaged in things like
waterboarding, which is not just
torture. We prosecuted people after
World War II for waterboarding
prisoners. We treated it as a war
crime. And my God, what a change of
fate, where we are now embracing the
very thing that we once prosecuted
people for.

Who are we
now? I know who we were then. But when
the president said that we don’t
torture, that was, frankly, when I had
to turn off my TV set.

OLBERMANN: That same
individual fell back on the same
argument that he’d used about the war in
Iraq to sanction this law. Let me play
what he said and then ask you a question
about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO
CLIP)

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yet with
the distance of history, the questions
will be narrowed and few. Did this
generation of Americans take the threat
seriously? And did we do what it takes
to defeat that threat?

(END VIDEO
CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Does he
understand the irony of those words when
taken out of the context of this
particular passage or of what he
perceives as the war against terror, and
that, in fact, the threat we may be
facing is the threat of President George
W. Bush?

TURLEY: Well, this is
going to go down in history as one of
our greatest self-inflicted wounds. And
I think you can feel the judgment of
history. It won’t be kind to President
Bush.

But frankly, I
don’t think that it will be kind to the
rest of us. I think that history will
ask, Where were you? What did you do
when this thing was signed into law?
There were people that protested the
Japanese concentration camps, there were
people that protested these other acts.
But we are strangely silent in this
national yawn as our rights evaporate.

OLBERMANN: Well, not to
pat ourselves on the back too much, but
I think we’ve done a little bit of what
we could have done. I’ll see you at
Gitmo. As always, greatest thanks for
your time, Jon.

TURLEY: Thanks, Keith.

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